Cape Town Travelogue 11/27-11/29
I started this post before we left Cape Town, but it took a while to get the photos uploaded.
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Boy do I have a lot to recap. I know that I’m going to have to split this post into two. We’ve been doing so much.
So where were we? Off to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens for an open air concert by Cofield Mundi (someone neither of us had ever heard of) last Sunday night.
I was finally starting to get more comfortable with my driving. We also learned that the GPS had listings for common sites like Kirstenbosch. (Today we learned that it also can plot routes to intersections like we needed that first day to get to Cape Fertility. Guess we should have RTFM’ed!) We packed a picnic with wine and found such a great setting that the concert was almost an afterthought.
On Monday after the great retrieval news, we decided to go out to Robben Island, the place where Nelson Mandela and other black political prisoners were held. The guidebook said that the 2.5 hour tour was way too short. I have to agree.
We took a 25 minute boat ride to the island, then boarded buses to tour the various parts of this former prison-now museum.
We saw the lime pit where the prisoners had to stay all day without breaks, without a bathroom, and without eye protection. So many of the prisoners had horrible vision problems after toiling in the pit.
The best part of the tour was the visit to the maximum security prison. There a former prisoner gave us a tour of the facility, discussing what it was like to be imprisoned in such a place.
There were, of course, idiots among the tourists who asked utterly ridiculous questions…so ridiculous that I really wanted to swat them. The guide explained that the prisoners were sent to Robben Island after trials.
“Where the trials fair?” one mental midget decided to ask. Yeah, sure, they were fair. It was perfectly fair to imprison blacks for struggling against those who would deny them the right to be free.
We went to the former dining hall and the guide showed the nutritional guidelines for the “colored” and for the “bantus” (i.e. blacks). The Bantus got less food than did the coloreds.
It was spelled out in black and white (pardon the word choice.) Again some simpleton asked the guide, “But were you bitter?”
I almost got off the bench and slapped her myself. The guide gave a great answer that basically said, how could he not be bitter? He was born into a system where he was devalued and restricted because of the misfortune of being born black. Being black was not a choice, so why should he suffer from such consequences? But in time he managed to leave his bitterness behind after he was released and apartheid fell because he thought of the great achievement: they had won. South Africa was now a place for all people.
We saw Mandela’s cell as well as the cells of numerous other political prisoners. Many of whose personal items were left on display in their cells along with their stories and memories. It was a sobering but still empowering experience.
Mandela’s cell:
Words left in another prisoner’s cell:
Item he referred to:
Me with the former prisoner who gave the tour:
When we returned to the Waterfront, we passed by the seals:
That night we dined at Emily’s Bistro in the V&A Waterfront. The buzz on Emily’s was that the food was good but overpriced. The food was excellent (I had ostrich steak) and the price was higher than most other Cape Town restaurants, but was still less than a similar meal I had recently at DC’s newest hot spot Citronelle.
I took this picture of the V&A Waterfront at night from our table at Emily’s:
On Tuesday we drove to Hout Bay, the fishing capital of the Western Cape.
I stopped to take zillions of pictures along the way as I drove along Victoria Drive hugging the water.
After our exploring, it was back to the V&A Waterfront for more shopping. We ate at a Portuguese restaurant, Tasca de Belem, that was very good. Mason had a huge plate of ribs. The sangria was a must have.
I couldn’t resist taking this sunset picture from our balcony that evening:
I’ll pick up from Wednesday in my next post. The penguins are coming!
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